Apache Guide: Configuring Your Apache Server
Installation Page 2

My personal preference is to install all of Apache in one location
(/usr/local/apache, to be specific) and then just make symlinks
from other locations. For example, system log files are located in
/var/log, so it might make sense to have the Apache log files
there also. However, instead of using a
--logfiledir=/var/log/httpd configuration option, I simply create
a symbolic link from /var/log/httpd to
/usr/local/apache/logs:

cd /var/log
ln -s /usr/local/apache/logs httpd

This is also handy for your log rotate scripts, which expect log files to
be in /var/log and subdirectories thereof.

You can tell Apache what modules to build and activate with configuration
options. In a default configuration, some modules are enabled, and others are
not. To change this default configuration, you can use the
--enable-module and --disable-module directives.

As I mentioned in my last column, there are two ways to configure your
Apache build. There's the method describe above, and then there's the
"old-fashioned" manual process. In the src/ subdirectory
is a script called Configure (big C), which uses a file called
Configuration to configure your build. A sample
Configuration file, called Configuation.tmpl, comes
with Apache. And when you run configure (small c), a configuration
file called Configuration.apaci is generated, and is then used by
Configure (big C) to configure the build.